In recent years, as digital data broadcast and digital video have prevailed, end users can handle multimedia data with ease. Also, prevalence of mobile communication devices such as portable phones, and the like allows the user to easily make wireless communications at a place where he or she visited, and an environment that allows network connections is in order. Hence, as a result of easy accessibility to multimedia data, mobile communication device such as a so-called third-generation portable phone and the like, which can handle multimedia data, have appeared.
However, a conventional portable terminal device does not always have sufficient processor performance and storage area to attain size and weight reductions. Hence, in order to process multimedia data, it is a common practice to, e.g., drop the resolution of an image or the frame rate (the number of frames per unit time) of a moving image.
Yet, a conventional portable terminal device does not perform any processes that fully utilize features of multimedia data to be handled. For this reason, in a portable terminal device as a typical compact, lightweight mobile communication device, various devices are made to attain size and weight reductions and to process multimedia data within its limited data processing performance and memory or within a limited bandwidth upon communications, so as to utilize its features. As one of such devices, low-bitrate, high-compression multimedia coding such as MPEG-4 may be used.
Object-based coding such as MPEG-4 can form one multimedia data by a plurality of objects. To these objects, data of various formats such as a moving image, static image, computer graphics (or vector graphics), text, audio, and the like can be applied. These objects can be held together with layout information of a tree structure.
However, the current specifications associated with multimedia data have very complicated format, and it is difficult to edit multimedia data under many restrictions.
Conventionally, upon editing such complicated multimedia data, it is a common practice to ask a third party, who saves and edit data in a personal computer or the like, which has less restrictions, or possesses a dedicated data edit machine, to do the actual job. Hence, services that execute an edit process by a server with a data edit function on the Internet and return the edit result to a client are provided, and techniques associated with such services have been studied.
At the present time, a simple multimedia e-mail service that composites a static image, sent to a server on the Internet, with a photo frame, music, message, or the like to generate composite data, and returns a URL (Uniform Resource Locators, RFC1738) indicating that processing result has been made available. That is, user's edit operations are made on another machine with sufficient processing performance, which is connected via a communication line or the like, due to limitations on the processing performance of the terminal device.
As described above, the process for making a server on the Internet edit data, and returning the processing result can composite a static image or a simple rectangular moving image by HTML (HyperText Markup Language). However, a process that edits multimedia data which has been encoded by object-based coding, and allows the user to acquire the edit result as object-based encoded data is not available.
On the other hand, the current specifications associated with multimedia data have very complicated format, and it is difficult to edit multimedia data under many restrictions. In this manner, since it is hard to edit multimedia data on a portable terminal with limited processing performance, the user must carry out a procedure for saving multimedia data on a personal computer as an apparatus having higher performance than the portable terminal, saving the edit result on the portable terminal again, and playing it back.
Conventionally, upon editing such complicated multimedia data, it is a common practice to ask a third party, who saves and edit data in a personal computer or the like, which has less restrictions, or possesses a dedicated data edit machine, to do the job. Based on this, services that execute an edit process by a server with a data edit function on the Internet and return the edit result to a client are provided, and techniques associated with such services have been proposed.
For example, according to Japanese Patent No. 3208116, a method of generating indices for audio and moving image data, and searching for a scene using such indices has been proposed. With this method, a location to be edited can be specified without playing back multimedia data.
Also, according to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-6608, a method that combines macro and micro searches and allows the user to conduct an easy moving image search has been proposed. In order to solve the aforementioned problems, this technique allows to easily search for a moving image saved in a WWW server, and to edit on the server side by designating edit conditions such as edit start and edit instructions from a WWW browser.
However, when every data edit processes are executed by a personal computer or the like which has less restrictions, another problem, i.e., a long data communication time, is posed. On the other hand, even a terminal device such as a portable terminal which has very limited processor performance and storage area can execute simple processes such as a process for extracting a part of a moving image.